Hi, I’m Uliana Salo, head of design at Open Builders, the team behind projects such as Notcoin and Not Games.
Over the past few years, I’ve been working on how simple game mechanics can bring millions of people into a product — and give them reasons to stay longer.
Notcoin began as a Telegram mini-game. At its core was a simple idea: a coin on the screen that people could tap. That was the entire game: no instructions or sophisticated rules. Tap, earn a coin, repeat — the core loop, complemented by additional mechanics for ongoing participation.
That simplicity was not accidental.
While working inside the TON ecosystem, my team and I kept seeing the same issue: for anyone new to Web3, getting started felt overwhelming. From day one, you were expected to understand wallets, private keys, chains, bridges — and the real risk of losing your funds if something went wrong.
The people who already understood these concepts were usually loyal and deeply engaged — but that group was growing slowly.
It became clear that bringing new people into the system couldn’t start with explaining decentralisation. Instead, the idea was to introduce Web3 gradually — through simple game interactions that build understanding over time. Rather than starting with Web3 explanations, the game invited people to play. Instead of asking for trust, it gave them something small to own — a game coin.
The hypothesis was simple: motivation changes when there’s a sense of ownership — even in a playful context. When something feels like it’s yours, curiosity grows naturally. If those coins could later turn into something real, it became much easier to explore how wallets work, how value moves, and what that actually means in practice.
The game also included an optional learning layer. As players progressed, they could unlock short explanations of Web3 concepts in exchange for in-game bonuses.
Over time, this interaction grew into a token with billions in market capitalisation and a game used by more than 35 million people.
From Notcoin to Not Games as a platform for third-party game economies, certain patterns became hard to ignore. What follows is a breakdown of those mechanics and the principles behind them — and how they played out.
1. Lowering the Entry Point
Despite the usual Web3 pattern of starting with registration, wallet setup, and network choices, Notcoin removed those steps from the beginning. There was no sign-up, no wallet creation, and no need to deal with fees or risks upfront.
Onboarding was not treated as a separate phase. There was no tutorial screen or instruction layer built into the product. Learning happened through use and through other people: users shared links, explained mechanics in chats, and demonstrated progress by example. This removed the need to understand Web3 concepts upfront and made the product legible in Web2 environments as well.
The Notcoin beta launched on December 5, 2023. By day 10, 6.3 million people had joined, with 2.5 million daily active users.
When I moved from Notcoin to Not Games, I applied the same principle at a different scale. The existing user base was carried over, and accounts were pre-created for them. Users did not have to re-onboard, re-register, or rebuild their identity from scratch.
2. Turning Useful Actions into Play
Some actions are necessary for the game to grow and function: coming back regularly, inviting others, and gradually understanding how things work. Instead of treating these as requirements, my team and I tried to make them part of gameplay.
Daily Actions as Game Mechanics
Daily login rewards are sometimes criticised for creating pressure to return.
In Notcoin, rather than offering a predictable daily bonus, certain actions were made free but limited in frequency. For example, players could use three turbo boosters per day at no cost. The mining bank could also be fully refreshed, but only once within a 24-hour window.
This shifted daily participation from obligation to access. Logging in was no longer about collecting a reward and leaving — it unlocked concrete actions that shaped how the game could be played that day.
Bringing People In
Inviting others was not treated as a one-time action. Invitations were tied to long-term participation: players received an extra percentage of points generated by the people they invited.
This meant that bringing someone in only mattered if that person stayed active. This made the mechanic feel more fair: inviting inactive people or bots produced little benefit, while inviting engaged players created ongoing rewards. Friends invited friends. Influencers invited their audiences. In both cases, rewards depended on continued activity rather than raw invite volume.
Learning Through Play
Learning about Web3 was not designed as a required step. My team and I intentionally avoided making education something people had to complete before taking part. Instead, it was offered as an option tied to concrete rewards. Web3 content was framed as simple stories, using plain language, avoiding jargon, and explicitly explaining terms when they were unavoidable.
The learning layer covered both foundational topics and more specific examples. Some pieces focused on basic concepts such as ownership or trustless interaction, while others introduced individual Web3 projects and how they worked in practice.
As rewards increased, players were sometimes asked to perform simple actions. These actions helped projects grow and reach new audiences, while allowing players to apply what they had learned about Web3 in a practical, low-risk way.
3. Making Effort Visible
Games, like many other products, need ways to acknowledge effort. If progress stays invisible, motivation fades quickly.
Leaderboards, leagues and competitive mechanics tap into a simple social dynamic: people care about where they stand in relation to others.
Visible progress helps turn private activity into something social — something others can recognise, respond to, and engage with.
The Leaderboard as a Social Surface
In Notcoin, the leaderboard functioned as an active space, with two parallel views — a daily leaderboard and an all-time leaderboard.
The daily leaderboard moved fast and reset frequently, making it easy to reach the top — and just as easy to lose that position within the same day. This kept competition immediate and encouraged players to stay active throughout the day.
The all-time leaderboard worked as a reputational layer. Reaching the top required sustained participation, and positions were more stable over time.
Profiles on the leaderboard were clickable. Players could open a profile and message someone directly in Telegram, turning visibility into a point of contact rather than a passive list.
To structure longer-term progress, leagues were introduced: players competed within their current tier and moved up after reaching clear milestones. This prevented players from staying at the top indefinitely and kept competition dynamic at every level.
Higher leagues required more time and completed quests. The Diamond League, for example, was reserved for the most committed players and rewarded with a diamond skin that signalled long-term dedication.
Of course, all of this worked as a single system. Daily activity fed directly into the leaderboard. Returning regularly and staying active affected what others could see. Progress was transparent: effort turned into position.
This made participation visible and comparable, turning personal activity into a public signal rather than a private score.
Assets as Identity: What You Own Tells Your Story
In Notcoin, I noticed that assets quickly started to function as reputation. Skins that were originally released as playful extras turned into status markers and signals of experience.
Some assets clearly communicated achievement. The diamond skin showed that a player had reached the final league. Other skins indicated participation in secret quests or hidden mechanics. Ownership became a way to say, “I’ve been through this part of the game.”
The cooler or rarer the asset, the more powerfully it represents you. It serves as a visual shorthand in the community, a way to instantly recognise a fellow veteran or a legendary player. In systems where these assets could be traded or sold, this identity could even acquire tangible market value, turning one’s reputation into personal capital.
Because of this, in Not Games I made player inventories public by default. Inventory, alongside rankings, became another visible layer of status. What you owned mattered not because of utility, but because it carried context and history.
4. Setting the Vibe
Not everything meaningful comes from planned mechanics. A large part of the experience is shaped by the game’s tone and behaviour: how it speaks to people, the kind of notifications it sends, what it chooses to reward, and what feels reasonable to expect from it.
In my experience working on games, some of the strongest moments appeared when the game acted slightly outside the routine and invited people to pay attention and figure things out together. These moments relied on curiosity, discussion, and shared interpretation, reinforcing the sense that the game had its own voice and presence.
A Simple Social Dilemma
For example, one unexpected moment took the form of a separate, minimal game built around interaction between two players.
Each round matched two people and offered a simple choice: take or share. If both chose to share, both gained points. If one took while the other shared, the one who took received everything. If both chose to take, both lost points.
Progress was only possible through cooperation. Short-term selfish choices made long-term success harder, pushing players to observe patterns, recognise trust, and adjust behaviour. The mechanic communicated its message through play rather than explanation and naturally filtered for attentive, engaged players.
The Hidden Code
Another experience was built around discovery rather than instructions.
Players noticed that short and long taps on the coin behaved differently. Small hints appeared briefly and spread through chats instead of the interface. Over time, players connected these gestures to Morse code and used them to unlock a hidden skin.
Nothing was announced upfront. Progress depended on noticing details, sharing information, and trying things out together.
The Burn
At one point, a voluntary action with no obvious benefit appeared in the game: players could burn all of their accumulated coins. There was no explanation and no promised reward.
Some players chose to do it. Later, those players received a unique badge or a multiplier based on the amount of coins they had burned. The message was simple: curiosity and willingness to participate mattered.
This created a small insider story that players remembered and retold. These moments operated outside the core economy. They rewarded curiosity and reinforced the idea that paying attention was part of playing.
How This Builds Community
In a game with millions of players, this helped separate highly engaged people from casual ones. Rewards felt deserved, and participation felt meaningful rather than automatic.
These moments also strengthened the community. Players discussed clues, shared discoveries, and compared progress across chats. Over time, conversations increasingly focused on how to access the closed community formed from the most active players and quest winners, reinforcing long-term involvement and social motivation.
5. Extra Care in Risky Places
Any system that works with users’ money or assets has very limited room for error. Wrong actions can be irreversible.
While I generally aimed for a minimal and fast experience, any flow involving potential loss required the opposite. In these moments, I believe it’s better to introduce a bit of friction: clearer confirmations, additional verification steps, and explicit explanations of possible consequences.
In some cases, manual moderation, waiting periods, or delayed actions were a better solution than instant execution. A slower but predictable system proved more reliable than a fast one that users could not fully understand.
Closing Notes
These mechanics and the principles behind them appeared in several of our projects and collaborations. They are not a formula for success. There are always exceptions, and this is a simplified view.
Mechanics alone don’t create engagement or meaning; context matters. A product still needs a clear idea, internal logic, and a reason to care. Mechanics — and the principles guiding them — support that core, reinforcing it and making interaction easier over time.